February 14, 2002
A Computer Shutdown Plays Havoc at
Interior
By TIMOTHY EGAN

After a 10-week court-ordered
shutdown of nearly all its
computer communications, the
Interior Department said yesterday
that it had restored some of them,
bringing e- mail back to
government scientists, Web service
to national parks - and payments
to nearly 40,000 American Indians.

The blanket electronic closing of a
department that manages
everything from seashores in New England to Lincoln's
birthplace in Kentucky stemmed from a problem that has
been out of sight of much of official Washington but has
played havoc with the lives of millions of people who depend
on an agency that is landlord to one-eighth of the United
States.

A federal district judge ordered the department on Dec. 5 to
shut down its entire computer system, saying it could not
safeguard the accounting system that manages money for
Indians.

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, who is hearing the largest
class-action suit ever filed by Indians, has already found
that the government mismanaged Indian money for more
than a century. In the process of a second trial, to determine
whether Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton should be held in
contempt for failing to comply with past orders on cleaning
up the department, the judge found that Interior's Web sites
were vulnerable to computer hacking.

In court in Washington yesterday, Secretary Norton
promised Judge Lamberth that checks were on the way to
thousands of Indians and said that about 40 percent of the
department's Web sites were safe enough from hackers to
reopen. The other major Interior Web sites remain offline.

To Indians who live in cities and on the reservations in the
West, and depend on the $500 million in annual income that
the department manages for them as part of a historic trust,
the promises have a hollow ring, some of them said.

"I've watched them jump around for Enron (news/quote)
while I haven't received so much as a single word about the
money they owe me," said Rosemary Pimms, a Yakama
Indian who lives in Seattle on the royalty payments that the
government manages for her. "Nothing new there: the
Indian is always last in line."

In Oklahoma, New Mexico and Washington state, which
have large tribal populations, the cutoff of royalty payments,
which come yearly, quarterly or monthly, put some families
in danger of losing their homes.

"The house payment is the one we're most worried about
now," said Billy Wolfe, who lives in a trailer with his wife,
Christine, in Lamar, Okla. The couple depend on $450 a
month in royalty income that the government manages for
them. They have not received a check for three months, and
there is a lien on the trailer, Mr. Wolfe said.

The Indians point out that the checks are not government
handouts, but money owed individual Indians from land
leased to outside business interests and managed by the
Interior Department.

There are more than 500,000 such accounts, though the
bulk of the money goes to 43,000 Indians who get regular
royalty checks ranging from a few dollars to several
thousand. The tribes say the government has lost up to $100
billion over the last century because of mismanagement and
poor accounting.

"The way these people have been treated recently is an
outrage," said Representative Tom Udall, Democrat of New
Mexico, whose district is 21 percent Indian. "It's just been a
huge injustice. There are people out there living day to day,
month to month on these checks, and the pace from Interior
has been like molasses in winter."

Some tribes, including the Blackfeet, the Oglala Sioux and
the Navajo, have made emergency funds available from
their tribal welfare accounts to individual Indians.

They say they are furious with Secretary Norton. "Where I
live, in Glacier County, Mont., home of the Blackfeet
Nation, one of the 25 poorest counties in the United States, I
can tell you that many people depend on these payments for
the bare necessities of life," Elouise Cabell said in testimony
before Congress last week.

Ms. Cabell, a former banker who is a member of the
Blackfeet Nation, initiated the lawsuit six years ago. She
says the way the government manages Indian money is "a
national disgrace."

Interior officials said yesterday that they should be able to
pay about half of what the Indians are owed from the
computer shutdown and would work to make up the full
amount in coming months.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Mrs. Pimms said.

The accounts date from the 1880's, when the government
tried to break up the tribal land ownership system and
awarded allotments of land to individual Indians. These
lands were then managed by the government, and usually
leased to gas, oil or timber companies. As with many trusts,
the funds are given to descendants as the oldest generations
die.

While most of the Interior computer shutdown has been felt
in Indian Country, outdoor enthusiasts have been upset at
the loss of Web access. Complaints from people planning
vacations to national parks, or trying to get permits to float
rivers on federal land, or simply trying to find out the status
of bird species from the Fish and Wildlife Service, have been
pouring into the department, officials said.

The shutdown has disrupted recruiting for summer
firefighters and studies on wetlands and endangered species,
and has forced thousands of government workers back to an
era of typewriters and endless paper forms.

"We are frustrated because we don't have e-mail between
employees, but the public is frustrated because this whole
link has been cut off," said John Wright, a spokesman for
the department.

Even with the National Park Service Web site scheduled to
open within a day, an Interior agency that manages even
more land - the Bureau of Land Management - will
remain offline indefinitely, as will the Fish and Wildlife
Service and the department's general site, officials said.

The Indians are trying to force the government to set up a
proper accounting system for the trust funds, and to repay
beneficiaries who may have lost money over the last
century. The accounts have been so mismanaged, tribal
members say, that they do not comply with even the basic
standards of running private trusts.

When President Clinton was in office, Judge Lamberth
found Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury
Secretary Robert E. Rubin in contempt for their handling of
the trust fund records, and the government paid a $600,000
fine.

In ruling three years ago for the Indians, Judge Lamberth
wrote, "It would be difficult to find a more historically
mismanaged federal program." His ruling was upheld last
year by a federal appeals court in the District of Columbia,
which wrote, "The trusts at issue here were created over a
hundred years ago, and have been mismanaged nearly as
long."